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Kotoku Shusui (November 4 or September 23, 1871 - January 24, 1911) was a
socialist and anarchist who played a leading role in introducing anarchism
to Japan in the early 20th century, particularly by translating the works of
contemporary European and Russian anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin, into
Japanese. He was a radical journalist and is often considered an anarchist
martyr, as he was executed for treason by the Japanese government.
Socialist years and imprisonment
Kotoku moved from his birthplace, the town of Nakamura in the Kochi
prefecture, to Tokyo in his mid-teens and became a journalist there in 1893.
From 1898 onwards he was a columist for the Every Morning News, one of the
more radical daily papers of the time; however, he resigned that position
when the paper took up a more pro-war stance during the Russo-Japanese War.
In 1903 he co-founded the Common People's Newspaper with another Every
Morning News journalist, Sakai Toshihiko. This paper's outspoken anti-war
stance and disregard of the state's press laws landed its editors in trouble
with the government on numerous occasions, and Kotoku himself served a five
month jail sentence in 1905 from February to July.
America and the anarchist influence
In 1901, when Kotoku had attempted to found the Japanese Social
Democratic Party with Sakai, he was not an anarchist, but a social democrat
-- indeed, Sakai and Kotoku were the first to translate The Communist
Manifesto into Japanese, which appeared in an issue of the Common People's
Newspaper and which got them heavily fined. His political thoughts first
began to turn to a more libertarian philosophy when he read Kropotkin's
Fields, Factories and Workshops in prison. In his own words, he "had gone
[to jail] as a Marxian Socialist and returned as a radical Anarchist." [1]
In November 1905 Kotoku travelled to the United States in order to freely
criticise the Emperor, whom he now saw as the linchpin of capitalism in
Japan. During his time in the US, Kotoku was further exposed to the
philosophies of anarchist communism and European syndicalism. He had taken
Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist as reading material for the Pacific
voyage; after he arrived in California, he began to correspond with the
Russian anarchist and by 1909 had translated The Conquest of Bread from
English to Japanese. One thousand copies of his translation were published
in Japan in March of that year and distributed to students and workers.
Return to Japan
On Kotoku's return to Japan, in June 1906, a public meeting was held to
welcome him. At this meeting, on June 28, he spoke on "The Tide of the World
Revolutionary Movement", which he said was flowing against parliamentary
politics (ie. Marxist party politics) and in favour of the general strike as
"the means for the future revolution." This was an anarcho-syndicalist view,
and one which, because anarcho-syndicalism was growing in the US at the
time, with the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, showed the
American influence clearly.
He followed this speech with a number of articles, the most well-known of
which was "The Change in My Thought (On Universal Suffrage)". In these
articles, Kotoku was now advocating direct action rather than political aims
such as universal suffrage, which was a shock to many of his comrades and
brought the schism between anarchist communists and social democrats to the
Japanese working class movement. This split was made clear when the
relaunched Common People's Newspaper folded in April 1907 and was replaced
two months later by two journals: the social democrat Social News and the
Osaka Common People's Newspaper, which argued from an anarchist position, in
favour of direct action.
Although most anarchists preferred peaceful means, such as the
dissemination of propaganda, many anarchists in this period turned to
terrorism as means of achieving revolution and anarchist communism, or at
least hitting out against the state and authority. Repression of
publications and organisations, such as the Socialist Party of Japan, and
"public peace police law", which effectively prevented trade union
organisation and strikes, were both factors in this emerging trend in Japan.
However, the only incident was when four anarchists were arrested for
possessing bomb making equipment. Although no attacks had been carried out,
in December 1910 twenty-six anarchists were convicted of plotting to
assassinate the Emperor. Kotoku was hung along with twelve others on 24th
January, 1911, even though only four of the hundreds arrested were found to
be involved in a planned attempt on the Emperor's life, and Kotoku wasn't
one of them.
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